Google Drive – DAM To Go Mainstream?

We have predicted it for some time and if the BBC start reporting about Google with headings like ‘Digital Assets’ then it’s a fair bet that Google are on the cusp of entering the DAM market:

“Cloud services have become hugely popular as people seek to access content from a variety of places and devices. Reports suggest that Google Drive will work with sophisticated image search technology to let consumers sift through a wide variety of document types, including PDF files and photographs.” [Read More]

This reads a lot like your typical DAM system to me, albeit one an individual rather than a corporation might use.

The template seems to be that larger companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Box.net (to a lesser extent) and now Google offer core infrastructure services like storage and search etc, whereas more niche vendors such as Adobe and a multitude of competing DAM vendors fight it out for the application services that run on one of the aforementioned leviathan’s hosting infrastructure (aka ‘the Cloud’). The former earn less per customer individually, but can scale up more easily and do not have the individual implementation complexity required of the latter (nor the volume of competitors).

Last week, CMSWire.com were gracious enough to post an article I wrote about the direction of the DAM market and the decline of individual DAM systems vs DAM solutions that are composed of multiple products. I proposed that the DAM market would sub-divide into at least two major offerings: with service infrastructure on one stream and user interfaces on the other. I suspect further fragmentation of both of these categories is on the cards and one could envisage media-specific services like transcoding and asset manipulation being bolted on to provide points of differentiation. Merely offering somewhere to store all your stuff is not much of a competitive play any longer, especially if Google are one of the elephants in your room.